X-men Origins: Wolverine goes M-rated. Better than film?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the tie-in game for the movie of the same name. …

"The problem with past Wolverine games is that they played to an ESRB rating, not who the character is," said Senior Producer Jeff Poffenbarger while showing off the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game recently to a few members of the gaming press. The movie will be rated PG-13, which means Logan/Wolverine will be slashing at the ground and walls, with perhaps a few bloodless attacks on enemies. But the game will be rated Mature, which means that Wolverine will be able to rip his prey limb from limb.

"In past games, you'd have things like Professor X telling Wolverine to 'sheath those claws!' and you know, I just did this after a while," Poffenbarger said, and he pantomimed putting the controller down. No one in the room had a sense of how bloody and violent the new game would be, as the pictures given to magazines and websites early on featured no blood and no violent attacks. We pressed for reasons why and everyone got uncomfortable.

It boils down to marketing, and perhaps keeping the expectations in line with what the movie will show. To illustrate Raven's love of the character, let me share some of the scenes we saw in our demo. A soldier stalks Wolverine, who stands on the other side of a cement wall. They're both listening to the wall, trying to sense the movements of the other. Wolverine puts his fist against the wall, pointing at the soldier's head. The claws come out, slicing through the cement and running through the man's head at three points. There is blood. The man twitches. Logan "sheaths those claws" and the man drops dead. The camera doesn't pull away.

In another scene, Wolverine leaps onto a helicopter, punches through the glass, drags the pilot out, and holds his head up to the spinning blades with predictably wet results. We see a multi-stage fight against a Sentinel, part of which happens in mid-air. The Sentinel crashes, and Wolverine puts his arms forward in a Superman pose and then slams through the robot's head like a bullet. The resulting crater looks just like the panel of a comic book.

It's odd to see Hugh Jackman become this brutal killer in the game, knowing that the violence and ferocity most likely won't be present in the film. Even cooler is that his healing factor is handled both as a game mechanic—this is the rare game where regenerative health makes sense—but also graphically. As Wolverine gets shot up you see blood on his clothes, then gashes in his skin, and then you can begin to see the adamantium skeleton underneath. If he gets really beaten up, you might see clean through his body in places. Don't worry: take out the threat and just wait. You'll watch his skin grow back and his wounds close in real time.

Later, I was able to play the game myself. The controls are intuitive, the battles intense. When your claws hit an arm, the arm comes off. To counteract the guns of your enemies, you have a targeted lunge move where Wolverine pounces on an enemy, claws out, and knocks him to the ground. There you can basically lay the chest open, blood and gristle flying this way and that. There are only a few moves that feel too "video gamey," such as a spinning attack where Logan begins to look like a helicopter.

There will be seven boss battles and, like the multi-stage Sentinel fight, some will be up to 30 minutes long. The gameplay is solid and feels great. Better yet, Wolverine is a feral, insane, brutal weapon in the game. It's like Raven used the movie tie-in as an excuse to make the Wolverine game we all wanted, and better yet was able to use Hugh Jackman's likeness to do things the film version could never get away with.

I had very few hopes for the game when I entered the meeting, but I left excited about the upcoming title. It's possible all this enthusiasm will be dulled by the full release—and we've been promised a review sample so we'll be able to give you all the dirt—but on the surface this looks like what a Wolverine game should be. I asked what other character Raven would like to handle next.

"We'd love to do the same thing with Gambit," I was told. Based on what we've seen far, we'd love it if they got the chance.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is coming to every platform under the sun May 1.